in Putin's Russia
When you uncover Russia's environmental devastation, especially if it's the military that's polluting, you risk being branded a spy and a traitor. Scientists, environmentalists, and journalists face prison.
By Fred Weir
MOSCOW — The two years since President Vladimir Putin arrived in the Kremlin have been a time of deeply conflicting signals. On one hand, the world has seen a young, educated and dynamic leader pledge to modernize Russia, and particularly to bring its law enforcement and judicial practices into line with international legal norms. On the other, the new president has apparently stood by while his ex-colleagues in Russia's FSB security service — the domestic wing of the former KGB — launched a series of dubious espionage cases against environmentalists, scientists, and journalists.
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Greenpeace activists take a reading as a Russian ship dumps radioactive waste in the Sea of Japan. © Greenpeace |
These prosecutions seem calculated to undermine the Kremlin's stated democratic goals. While spies undoubtedly exist, and it is the job of security agencies to catch them, the wave of treason trials in Russia increasingly looks like a Soviet-style official campaign to intimidate critics, chill whistleblowers, and harshly discourage intellectuals from making normal contacts with their foreign counterparts.
The most worrying cases (though human rights workers point to many more) are those of environmental journalist Grigory Pasko, arms control specialist Igor Sutyagin, diplomat Valentin Moiseyev, and physicist Valentin Danilov. All have been charged with "treason in the form of espionage" and tried by panels of judges in closed courtrooms under the terms of a secret and unpublished law — Defense Ministry Decree Number 55 — which has been ruled illegal by Russia's Supreme Court.
Those arrested endure years of imprisonment in pretrial detention centers known as SIZOs, while the FSB conducts its investigations. The SIZO network, which currently houses almost 300,000 prisoners, has a reputation for brutality and neglect, with inmates often packed into cells with sitting room only, forced to sleep in shifts, given inadequate food, clothing, and medical care. Access to attorneys and families is sometimes denied; AIDS, tuberculosis, and other diseases run rampant.
The trials themselves have been marked by major procedural violations, including repeated mistrials, and, human rights activists allege, intense FSB pressure on judges to return guilty verdicts. "We are seeing a concerted effort by the secret services to regain their old levers of control over society," says Yury Schekochekin, a liberal parliamentarian and member of the State Duma's Security Committee. "The message of these trials is that almost any contact with foreigners can land you into trouble."
NIKITIN: DUMPING AT SEA EXPOSED
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Nikitin holds the report that revealed massive nuclear abuses and landed him in jail. © Zana Briski |
The iron alliance between Russia's military establishment and the FSB is nothing new. Both regard any public scrutiny of the armed forces as a severe breach of national security, and the FSB has been quick to arrest perceived violators.
The best-known example in the past decade is Aleksandr Nikitin, a soft-spoken ex-submarine captain who co-authored a 1995 report for the Norwegian environmental group Bellona on nuclear abuses by the Russian navy's Northern Fleet. Drawn entirely from public sources, the report revealed massive nuclear abuses by the fleet, including throwing raw radioactive waste into the Arctic Ocean, junking old reactors in unguarded areas and simply losing large quantities of high-grade nuclear materials.
The prime goal of the FSB is to stifle public debate about these problems, not to protect national security," says Ivan Blokov, Greenpeace-Russia campaign director. There is a lot to cover up. "More than 60 million Russians are living in zones of ecological hazard, and the biggest threat comes from radioactive contamination," says Blokov.
Arrested in early 1996, Nikitin endured five years of prison, house arrest, and five court hearings that ended with his case being returned to the FSB for re-investigation by judges who were apparently fearful to defy the FSB by setting him free. Finally, in early 2000, Russia's Supreme Court acquitted Nikitin and, several months later, issued a judgement that slammed the FSB for imprisoning the whistleblower under secret regulations and trying him for violating unpublished and retroactively applied laws. In subsequent rulings, stemming from the Nikitin case, the Supreme Court severely restricted the power of judges to return inconclusive cases to police organs for re-investigation and, in November 2001, abolished Decree 55, the secret regulation that defines what constitutes "secret" materials.
Many journalists and human rights workers hailed Nikitin's landmark victory as a clear sign that President Putin was already delivering on his promises to tame the military/security establishment, reform the courts and strengthen human rights guarantees for Russians.
But the proliferation of FSB-run spy cases since, applying the same methods as in the Nikitin case, have left a very different impression. "As long as we have a Soviet army and Soviet security service, we will have Soviet courts," says Yury Schmidt, Nikitin's lawyer, who now advises attorneys for Pasko, Sutyagin, and others. "So far, Nikitin's exoneration remains just a personal victory for Nikitin himself. Apparently there is still a lot of work to do."
PASKO: GUILTY OF NOTE TAKING
Grigory Pasko endured a less publicized but strikingly similar ordeal. In 1997 the FSB arrested the reserve naval officer turned environmental journalist after he handed Japanese TV reporters videotape of Russian naval vessels illegal dumping nuclear waste in the Sea of Japan. In 1999 a military court in Vladivostok rejected the FSB's treason charge against Pasko, but convicted him on a minor count of "abusing his position" as a naval officer. The Supreme Court subsequently amnestied Pasko, but he insisted on appealing the decision anyway. A year ago, Pasko was re-arrested and returned to the same court to face fresh treason charges. This time, the FSB argued that Pasko had attended a secret military council in 1997, took notes, and intended to pass information about "secret naval maneuvers" to the Japanese media — though he was never accused of actually having done so.
"Pasko was a journalist," says Alexander Tkatchenko, a member of Pasko's public defense committee. "He was invited to attend a military meeting, and of course he took notes. He never gave the notes to anyone. Is this treason?" The court decided it was. Last December Pasko was convicted and sentenced to four years hard labor. The court has refused requests from many governments, international human rights groups, as well as Pasko's friends and family, to release him pending the outcome of his appeal to the military college of the Supreme Court. AI adopted both Pasko and Nikitin as prisoners of conscience.
SUTYAGIN: LACK OF EVIDENCE, LAW
Igor Sutyagin, a researcher with the Institute of Canada-USA Studies in Moscow, was arrested by the FSB in October 1999, after he had participated in an international survey on military-civil relations, funded in part by Canada's Defense Department. Sutyagin, who never had access to classified materials, was also accused of passing military information gleaned from the Russian press to a British public relations firm named Alternative Futures. The FSB alleges that the company was a front for the secret service of "a NATO member state."
Two years in pretrial detention have taken "a terrible toll on Igor," said his wife, Irina. "He wrote about military affairs and arms control issues, but his only sources were the Russian press. When the FSB searched our apartment after his arrest, they took away huge piles of newspapers."
Last December, a judge threw out the case, noting there had been substantial violations of legal procedure, which deprived the defendant of his constitutional right to defend himself.
Still, Sutyagin faces up to two more years in prison. As in Nikitin's case, a Russian-style mistrial enables the judge to avoid infuriating the FSB with an acquittal, but imprisons the defendant while investigators continue the grueling investigation and re-design the case against him.
As a Russian lawyer, "I do not understand this situation," says Anna Savitskaya, Sutyagin's lawyer. "The Supreme Court has ruled that cases can only be sent back when there have been serious violations of court procedure. But in this case the problem was that they were prosecuting Igor under an illegal law [Decree 55] and there was no evidence against him. I think the judge didn't want to find him guilty, but was afraid to acquit. So this result was a compromise."
MOISEYEV AND DANILOV: ADDING TO THE PATTERN
Valentin Moiseyev, a Russian career diplomat arrested in 1998 for allegedly passing secrets to South Korea, also endured a series of inconclusive trials. The judge in his third trial, in November 2000, mysteriously fell ill on the last day. As a result, Moiseyev was ushered into a new court room to begin his fourth trial and was sentenced last fall to four and a half years for treason. The conviction was upheld by a Supreme Court review in January.
Valentin Danilov, a respected physicist at Krasnoyarsk State Technical University in Siberia, was arrested in February 2001 and charged with selling rocket secrets to China. The allegation relates to an open commercial contract Danilov signed with a Chinese company on behalf of his university. An open letter signed by half a dozen of Danilov's colleagues shortly after his arrest maintained that the information to be sold was declassified in 1992 and has been available in the open scientific press for years.
"I have no doubt that there are real spies, but the cases of Pasko, Sutyagin, Moiseyev and Danilov do not resemble real spy stories," says Ernst Chorny, who heads the Moscow office of Ecology and Human Rights, a coalition of public groups. "All these trials at one time are not a coincidence, they constitute a campaign. The defendants have been chosen not on the basis of their guilt, but to send a particular message to a certain social group."
Last November the Supreme Court struck down major parts of Decree 55, and abolished the entire decree in February. But it is unclear what effect this decision will have on these cases. The general prosecutor has already said that it will not change anything for the two defendants already convicted and imprisoned, Pasko and Moiseyev. As for those still on trial, Sutyagin and Danilov, human rights workers fear that the FSB may well walk into the court with a whole new decree when those trials re-open.
FEELING THE CHILL
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A child from Mayak — contaminated by Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal — lies ill in the Chelyabinsk Hospital cancer ward. © Greenpeace / Vielmo |
Activists and journalists don't need a weatherman to know which way the chill blows. "Try to take a radiological reading anywhere in Russia, and you're likely to get arrested," says Vladimir Slivyak, co-chair of EcoDefense, noting that more than 30 per cent of Russian territory has unsafe levels of radioactivity.
"There is constant harassment of our people, and it's getting worse." Slivyak himself was picked up by the FSB two years ago, detained and, he says, threatened.
"They told me it would be easy to plant drugs on me, or weapons, and I would be sent away for years. They told me: 'don't mess with us, you'll lose,'" he says. Slivyak adds he immediately informed foreign colleagues about the threat, and hasn't had a repeat visit from the FSB.
But the current wave of trials has had a chilling impact on environmental activism. "A lot of people who work on ecological issues aren't ready to be heroes," he says. "They are just not prepared for a face-to-face encounter with the FSB. We carry on, but the situation cannot be described as normal."
Alexei Simonov, head of the Glasnost Defense Foundation, a Russian human rights, media watchdog, says the arrests have dramatically dampened journalistic inquiry into environmental and national security issues. "We see the press self-censoring now, where some years ago there were real attempts to scrutinize," he says. "Today, not a single military journalist will attempt to delve into the issues that Pasko was writing about, such as disposal of nuclear waste. Whatever happens in these trials, I think we can say the FSB's goal of limiting social debate around such matters has already been largely accomplished."
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Russian nuclear dumping poses a grave threat to the Arctic's fragile ecosystem. © Greenpeace / Kantor |
"Under Putin the FSB has gotten back some of its Soviet-era functions, including the right to conduct investigations and to hold detainees in its own prison [Moscow's Lefortovo prison]" says Naum Nim, a leading member of Pasko's defense committee and editor of the Index on Censorship's Internet human rights forum. Alexei Simonov, president of the Defense of Glasnost Foundation, an independent human rights group, says Russia is slipping back into historic police state form. "We are seeing the steady implementation by the FSB of a clear task: to make sure that journalists are not nosey, that scientists shouldn't dip into sources that may have been accidentally declassified, that diplomats shouldn't meet other diplomats privately. That is, we are moving back to the times when fear pervades everyday life and the behavior of every citizen."
Not everyone is so pessimistic. "There is no strong civil society in Russia, but there are lots of people who are fighting on these issues," says Yury Schmidt, who persevered and eventually won Nikitin's case. "These FSB cases are notable mainly for their incompetence, and we have already shown that they can be defeated by legal methods. Let's be patient. No one can undo the changes of the past 15 years." 
